


Matched Set

by Annie D (scaramouche)



Category: Tenet (2020)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Getting Together, M/M, Post-Canon, Second person POV, Time Inversion Weirdness, happy endings are subjective
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-26
Updated: 2020-09-26
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:13:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26661994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scaramouche/pseuds/Annie%20D
Summary: The Protagonist figures out his next steps, and where Neil fits into them.
Relationships: Neil/The Protagonist (Tenet)
Comments: 31
Kudos: 196





	Matched Set

**Author's Note:**

> Gear up for Second Person Protagonist POV! I'm not entirely sure if this *is* canon compliant, seeing as a canon refresher is not so easy to do at the moment, but an attempt was made.
> 
> [Korean language translation available here.](https://68ygykkjbdrkwla.postype.com/post/8108888)

The next time that you see Neil, only a mere handful of weeks have passed for you after Stalsk-12.

The meeting is unintentional. You’re chasing a series of inverted dead drops – these ones small, experimental and clumsy, and not yet the slick packages sent to Sator – and your chase has led you to a highly-protected laboratory in the Caucasus.

You’re in the well-tailored suit of a potential investor, who has a background of shady dealings and dubious goals to make you more attractive to your current company. A head scientist who is less a scientist and more a salesperson is showing you around, and teasing you with the weaponizing potential of micro-universe-folding. You choose your smiles and questions carefully, so the man thinks you don’t entirely understand but are very much interested.

It’s as you’re escorted down a corridor that a nearby lab door opens, and Neil steps out.

He is alive, and as tall and pale as you’ve seen him over and over in your dreams. But his hair’s darker and shorter, and there are fewer lines around his currently-unsmiling mouth. He’s wearing glasses and a laboratory coat, and a lanyard hangs from his neck, introducing him as _Dr. H. Weber._

Your footsteps don’t falter in the slightest, not even when you see Neil clock you in return, his eyes flickering behind his lenses. Since the head scientist pays Neil no mind, you follow his lead and limit yourself to a disinterested glance at a person who might as well be furniture.

You walk on, keeping close to your mark. You hear Neil’s footsteps shuffle away in another direction. You focus on the mission, and there only a few empty minutes between all the scouting where you allow yourself to wonder how early on this is for Neil.

Towards the end of the tour you excuse yourself to use the men’s room. You’re washing your hands when you hear, and then see, Neil enter.

“Thought it was a tenet of men’s rooms everywhere to not make eye contact.” Neil’s hands are held loosely around a folder, his fingers intertwined.

“A tenet you’ve failed to obey,” you reply, your fingers intertwined in a hold just above your belt. “I’m just saying.”

Neil washes his hands in a sink before leaving. Both of you say nothing else to each other.

It’s later that evening, in the far more secure location of your hotel room, that the conversation resumes. Neil knocks on your door, and you let him in and offer coffee. He refuses politely and takes a seat, resignation in the fold of his limbs. He’s not wearing the glasses.

You knew this would happen; you’ve been bracing yourself for it. Admittedly, you thought it would be a while yet before it did, perhaps after you’ve gotten some of the topmost items on your list out of the way, and have made more than a handful of connections with other Tenet agents. You’re still finding your feet; you can still see the spray of red in a helmet when you close your eyes. It seems too soon.

But too soon or not, it’s happening. Neil’s here, and you’ve met him again.

“I’ve been working this for months,” Neil says, sounding churlish. You try to guess his age but find it surprisingly difficult. Ten years seems highballing it, but you could swear that he still has some baby fat around his neck. “Are you tearing it down?”

“I’m not stopping you,” you reply. “Whatever it is you’re doing.”

“If no one’s told either of us that we’d crossover, then we’re probably meant to be working together.”

“Or you’re my in.”

Neil raises an eyebrow. “That’s a great deal of work for… what are you looking for?”

“Inverted objects. Small. Scavenged.”

Interest lights Neil’s eyes. “I haven’t seen any, but it would explain the latest experiments. There’s been a push to some new directions.”

“They’ve gotten ideas from whatever it is they’ve found. What experiments are you looking at?”

“Particle acceleration, it’s all the rage. Precursor tech, maybe. What’s your plan?”

Neil may be younger, but he knows _you’re_ younger, too. He wasn’t sure if you’d been recruited yet, and your presence here potentially jeopardizes his mission. Still, he defers to you, easily and without hesitation. That’s something to think about.

For the next two weeks you work together and it’s… fine. Neil’s quick, sharp and real fucking smart, and does everything you ask of him. But at the same time, he bristles at some of your orders, doesn’t shadow you as effectively, and more than once when you turn expecting him to have your back, he isn’t there. You have to call in extra help to round up the crew for the break-in.

Through it all Neil’s curt and snarky, and sometimes sounds more like Ives. The annoying thing is, you can’t tell Neil that because you don’t know if _he_ already knows Ives. Here’s Neil, alive and breathing as you’d waited him to be, yet you find yourself missing the _other_ one.

Perhaps this is how it’s always going to be, because it’s how it’s always been. For every meeting from now into the years together that Neil said you’d have, you’ll be teetering over the unknown gaps between the two of you. Maybe what Neil described as “a beautiful friendship” was a joke earned somewhere in those years, where the punchline is currently still unknown to you.

The mission itself wraps up as a success, with all traces of the drops destroyed and the targets delivered safely into Wheeler’s waiting hands. You and Neil are at a warehouse for the handover, and you half expect Neil to walk away without another word.

But he comes to you and says, “See you around, then.”

You see in your mind’s eye a corpse jerk back to life to give you a chance, and a part of you wants to cut Neil some slack. But you find yourself saying, “Only if you get better, hotshot. If you keep falling behind like that, you’re gonna get scratched.”

The rebuke is unexpected, and Neil startles. Something flickers in his eyes – recognition, perhaps, or whatever would better describe one-sided memories – but he nods, accepting it without protest.

You part ways then – him to check in with his handler, and you to keep chasing the next lead – but you dare a glance back. Neil doesn’t, so you watch him sling his rucksack over his shoulders and walk to the truck. Your eye immediately goes to place the token would be, but where you expect red string and a washer, you see a black teardrop knot.

+

You’ve figured out some things.

They’re obvious things, but only to anyone who knows enough and is not sitting in the splintered silos that is the basis of Tenet’s design. _Ignorance is our ammunition,_ so it is _you_ who pushes the levers at both ends, and holds the web of accountability through time.

At least, you think that’s how it goes. You expect that you’ll be finding more and more threads as the work goes along, and a great many of those will have to be tied down by you one way or another.

You do know that your influence goes forwards and backwards. You’ll make sure the vacuum left behind by Priya’s death will be filled up with another of your choosing, and you’ll make sure that Priya will be placed where she was to begin with. You’ll lay groundwork into the future all the way to the discovery of inversion, and you’ll send the groundwork all the way backwards to the furthest reaches of where inversion can go.

You’ll receive (or more likely, intercept) information from the future on how to build the turnstile, and you’ll make sure that every turnstile ever built under your watch has a lifespan only as long as the great pincer movement needs it to be. You’ll enable the building of the turnstile that’s as far back into the past as you can make it, and it will hopefully lock the end point of that journey; the dead-end marker for anyone and anything traveling in that direction.

 _This_ is the war you’re fighting. You see it – not fully, of course, but clear enough.

There may be more, but you can’t be there for everything. If there’s a need for it, you’re sure that there will be others to take the lead at each point forward and backwards where your direct reach fails you. You expect to communicate with most of them in their own way, and even meet some of them in your lifetime.

Satisfied with knowing this, you get to work.

+

The third time you see Neil, it’s a few months later in your personal chronology, but a few weeks later in the world’s chronology. Neil’s chronology, however, is something entirely different, because he is older from when you saw him last, but younger from when you saw him first.

You’re in a small infiltration unit, no more than two dozen agents in tactical gear, gathered for a pincer movement at a test site in Nevada. Ives is commander – a younger Ives who doesn’t yet have a bullseye on your head, but he’s met you before and thus doesn’t question your joining the mission last-minute. You slip into the group during briefing, and make no remarks that would draw attention to you.

As far as everyone here’s aware, you’re just one of them. You here to secure the location and nothing more.

But Neil’s also here. You see him two rows ahead in the debrief seats, his hair bleached by the sun and the tilt of his neck recognizable. When the briefing ends and everyone stands, you see the red token swinging from his rucksack.

Both you and Neil are on Ives’ inverted unit, but you decide not to make contact with him. If it happens, it’ll happen.

It happens.

After deployment, you’ve pulled away from the rest of the unit, slipping through forward and inverted agents to your goal. You ignore the main bunker; your target is a location that has been marked for a dead drop zone, but today you will make unusable.

As you’re running, you spot Neil crouched low and firing at hostiles. The agent covering him is clumsy, leaving him open. You see the rubble on the ground shift in readiness for an inverted implosion.

You change direction. Neil sees you coming, one visible eye widening through the eyepiece of his combat gas mask. He understands immediately, and rolls away as slices of concrete return to their location where he’d been standing. You glance at him as you run past him, moving into a greater arc to your secondary target. Neil gets up and runs with you.

The detour leads you to the secondary entrance. You pause there, checking that its clear, and you can feel Neil doing the same at your six.

“You got an urge to be an understudy or what?” you say.

“Hey now,” Neil replies, his voice distorted but warm through the commlink. “if you didn’t need a hand, you could’ve just said so.”

You smile.

When you head in, eyes and gun up, you are fully focused. Neil follows, and though you have no idea if he’s aware what you’re here for, it doesn’t seem to matter. You get in, you plant the charges, and you’re out.

That said, it doesn’t go as smoothly as you’d like. On the way up Neil’s right ankle gives out under him, and it’s up to you to drag both of you out of there. You cling onto him, his arm over your shoulder as you trace the way to the pick-up point, Neil’s grunts getting more labored as you go.

Though you can’t see a clear exit, there’s no fear that both of you won’t get out of this a-okay. You know it works out, because it’ll always work out. Neil’s death is pinned to a place far, far away.

You’re both nearing the perimeter when you think you see where the injury is going to happen. You set Neil against the cover of metal crates while you fire at fresh, forward-moving hostiles. You hear the forward-moving truck coming up from an angle. You grab at Neil to pull him to you, and you both fall.

There’s the sound Neil hitting the ground, and a second later he bounces back onto his feet, right as rain. “Hah!” he barks. He pumps one fist in the air, and you smack at said fist in amusement.

“Come on,” you say. You resume running for the pick-up point, and he keeps pace easily.

“Hate it when that happens,” Neil says.

“Hate it when I have to drag your sorry ass for you,” you reply.

“You’re still new,” he says, with an assured frankness that has you internally catching your breath, “so maybe no one’s told you yet, but we don’t say thank you in this business. Still: thank you.”

You’re still running, so you can’t look at him directly. Yet you know that if you did, and if he wasn’t wearing the mask, that he’d be smiling.

The pick-up’s still there. You make it, and are transported out of there for the debrief, the intel of which will be collated for the forward team’s briefing. Neil sits with you for the debrief, but fades into the crowd afterward. You tell yourself you’re not disappointed.

After you’re checked over and done cleaning up, you step out of the recovery module to see Neil leaning against a wall, waiting for you. Behind the layers of _look at him, still alive_ and _give me the fucking life story you promised me_ is the slightly buried thought of: _handsome bastard._

You glance at the turnstile beyond the plastic curtain, but Neil just shrugs, unruffled and unhurried.

“Anything interesting happening?” Neil asks.

“I need to keep going back another eight days,” you tell him. “Close the lead for this trace.”

Neil nods, and helps arrange for the shipping container that’ll send you back. He stays with you until it’s ready, and follows you into the container for pre-checks. Neil is thorough, and grumbles about the state of the sleeping cots.

“If we can find a way to ship a swanky hotel room in one of these, I’m sure you’ll be the first to know,” you say.

“Well, that’s a bummer, isn’t it,” Neil replies.

For a great deal of your career you’ve worked alone and in interchangeable teams, rarely sticking with anyone for very long. You’re unused to feeling as though you have a phantom limb, taunting you.

Right now, you want to ask Neil if he can join you. Eight days seem plenty of time to pace out the questions you’ve spent months accumulating, but something holds you back. Maybe it’s how Neil doesn’t offer. He might be waiting for _you_ to ask, but you don’t think so. Even with the illusion of a more reachable Neil, the same gaps between you exist, and you’re both still teetering over them.

It’ll get easier, you tell yourself. There’s just a language here you haven’t learned yet, but you will, because Neil’s already learned it. You’ll figure it out the way you’re figuring everything else out. Time isn’t the problem.

“See you on the other side.” You offer Neil your hand, and he takes it. His grip is solid and, if you’re not imagining it, lingers longer than necessary.

This time when you part ways, you turn around first, and he’s the one who watches you go.

+

Sometimes you wonder: why you? It’s not a question that can be answered satisfactorily, because it’s always been you, so it will always be you. Your fingerprints are on the noise of documents that subtly track the locations of the algorithm pieces where you’ve sent them back to. Your hand is on the wild crisscrossing that moves people back and forth across the board.

This knowledge gives you confidence, but it also enables you to let go when you need to. You’ve learned that you can’t plan the work exactly based on what you’ve seen, because what you’ve seen has come through a very narrow lens to begin with.

You act as events take you, and you learn and adjust and sometimes double-back as you go. (The phantom limb follows you.)

You realize that the pincer movement centered on Stalsk-12 means that you will live out the years before and after it repeatedly. The fact that no one knew about the Stalsk-12 detonation before you told them about it means that the knowledge will be effectively lost. Either that’s a _lot_ of threads that need tying down, or there will be more combat missions, forward and backward, that mask its significance. Probably a combination of both.

It also means you’ll be coming back to this section of time for another pass, again and again and again. Just the way that Ives described.

Besides, your enemies in the future won’t put all their eggs into Sator’s basket. There will be other attempts all around it, and you’ll catch all of them as you circle the algorithm’s fixed point.

Overall, you estimate that the chronological range you’ll be active in is the three-to-ten years in both directions of Stalsk-12. This is where you will live, and from where you will direct your war.

You accept this as the terms of your service.

+

The fourth time you see Neil, it’s a few months later in your chronology and, once again, you’re not expecting it.

You’re planning a heist and have requested an assist. When you arrive at the safe house, Neil’s the one who’s waiting for you. You think you do a decent job of masking your surprise, but Neil sees it anyway and grins.

At a glance, you can’t tell where in Neil’s personal chronology he is. He’s not as young as the youngest that you’ve seen him, but his smile, though genuine, isn’t as easy as you know it can be. When you clasp arms in greeting, his hand doesn’t linger at all.

“Yep, you’re stuck with me,” Neil says.

“I’ll survive,” you reply. “How’s your cryptography?”

“Not as good as yours, but I’ll make do.”

You may not know where Neil’s personal chronology may be, but you _do_ know that he doesn’t yet know Sator’s significance, and doesn’t yet know about the algorithm. For the sake of all of this, you keep the mission parameters simple.

“We’re doing a switch,” you tell him. “Inverted data packet. But first we need to find out the where and how.”

Neil grimaces. “Tell me you at least know the when.”

“I thought you liked a challenge?”

“Did you? Alas.”

You roll your eyes. “I know the when, Neil.”

“Oh thank God.”

You still feel the curiosity you had months ago, but during the mission itself you stay focused. It’s easy to do that, with Neil at your side. You don’t pull, don’t push, and you don’t make it obvious that you’re eagerly swallowing the crumbs that Neil gives you in passing.

He’s an only child, has been on more than one mission over Greenland, and isn’t fond of salted nuts. During a set up, he makes an off-hand remark that Priya won’t approve of your bullying one of her sources, and you realize that he doesn’t know that Tenet is yours.

The heist takes a few weeks, inclusive of the small portion where you invert. You cannot be seen by Sator’s people, so Neil makes the switch, and the tweaked plans are sent off. As a result, a few years in the past Sator will build his turnstile, but it will also be your turnstile. You, and your partners further in the past, will be able to use a specific radiation fingerprint to identify where the turnstile is and everything that it inverts.

That said, while the switch itself is successful, your cover of a bank robbery goes sideways and you need to fight your way through a mafia group that has nothing to do with your mission. Honestly, you find it funny, but Neil doesn’t.

In fact, Neil vibrates with tension the whole drive back to the safe house.

Once inside the safe house, you start to make your way to your room, but Neil’s hand on your shoulder stops you. You try to brush off his fussing, but Neil snaps at you, and it’s an echo of the much younger Neil that you’ve already met. He pushes you onto the couch where he helps you strip out of your protective gear.

“Why do you keep doing this,” Neil says under his breath.

Then, you understand.

You sit back and watch as Neil touches you, his fingers sure on your skin, and you understand.

You wait until he’s satisfied. The scratches high on your chest are superficial and shallow, but Neil needs to be sure. Once the pinch around Neil's eyes has eased up, you say to him: “You see me die, don’t you?”

A good agent Neil may be, but you’ve found one of his limits, and it is in the admission that’s now on his face.

You’ve surprised him. You’re pretty certain that this Neil knows you longer than you’ve known him, but you’ve still managed to surprise him. Emotions dance over his face: the aforementioned surprise, delight at being surprised, and then anger.

“You know,” Neil accuses, his face coloring as he leans towards you. “You’ve _known_. You, you son of a bitch—”

Neil kisses you, and you understand something else.

You _have_ thought of this, because it’s your job now to think in five dimensions, but to imagine Neil’s mouth and hands is not the same thing as knowing them. You kiss back, clamp your hands around Neil’s arms and pull him onto your lap, and it’s only the slight discomfort at your collarbone that stop you from doing more right then and there.

You have one more night in the safe house, though, and you _have_ finished the job.

Neil’s bed makes for a cool detour.

You don’t ask Neil if this is his first time sleeping with you, because it’s pretty damn clear that it’s not, even before he starts riding you. You have a feeling that he’d insist it be this way even if you weren’t injured at all. The asshole can’t stop grinning, and works your dick with a relish that you’d find annoying if you weren’t too busy coming so hard you see stars.

As you catch your breath, Neil hums contentedly and keeps petting you, fingers curling across the hair high on your chest. He seems in no hurry to come himself. When you eyeball him, he says, “Revenge. For something you’re going to do.”

“Swell,” you say dryly, though you’re already picturing yourself shoving Neil’s ankles over his head in that nebulously-promised future.

You help Neil to an enthusiastic finish, because you’re still a gentleman. Another thing you learn tonight is that Neil is the sort of person who is wired after sex, and he leaves to make himself a cup of tea that he brings back to bed. He doesn’t offer you one, because you wouldn’t want it.

“So,” you say, “you’re _not_ angry at me anymore, I take it?”

Neil laughs. It’s beautiful, he’s beautiful.

“Just a tad.” Neil’s teasing smile fades a little, but his next words are not meant to hurt. “I was plenty angry at first, of course. You swept into my life like a goddamned hurricane, and then you were gone. I couldn’t understand why the hell you seemed to just… let it happen.” His eyes take on a faraway look, as you know yours do as your mind’s eye sees him – another him – stand atop a hypocenter and tell you to _let him go._ “You didn’t tell me that I’d see you again. Sure, I guessed that it was likely to happen, but not to this extent. And not that we would have… this.”

You suppress the urge to apologize for something you haven’t done yet.

His bare hip is warm under the trail of your fingers. A picture is forming in your head. You lick your lips and say, “Is this the part where I ask you to stay—” _with me_ “—in my slipstream?”

Neil grins. “Nope.” He puts his tea away and kisses you again, almost distracting you.

“But it does happen,” you insist.

“Yes,” Neil says, and you relax. “We shouldn’t be able to get away with it, but I suppose since we have, we will.”

You hum as you consider telling him that you’re the one running Tenet, so if you want to keep this, it is you who makes it happen. Ignorance may be your ammunition, but you know, at the very least, that no one will kill Neil for knowing who you are. Still, you decide that though you may tell him one day, it won’t be today.

“But sometimes we weave in and out, meeting each other,” you say.

Neil nods. “Sometimes. Do you know how to tell? Which me it is, at any moment you meet me?”

You incline your head to the chair by the dresser. Neil’s rucksack is there, and the red string and washer – the marker of what he is to you – half-visible from a pocket. Neil laughs softly, pleased.

“So where’s mine?” you ask.

Neil rolls over to grab said rucksack, and rummages deep for what he’s looking for. A directly matching set wouldn’t make sense, so the token that he hands to you is a leather weave. More pertinently, it is blue.

“Of course,” you say, at the same time that Neil does. But where your statement is your own, his is echoing another time and place.

He gives you the token, and you stroke a thumb along the grooves of the weave. You know exactly where you’re going to put it, so that Neil will be able to see it on you.

+

Three to ten years in each direction of Stalsk-12 is a pretty compact time frame. Yet, in a world where you’re making sure your agents are spread out as widely as possible, you met Neil again so quickly, and you’ve kept on meeting him.

The reason for that is, of course, because he’s in this pincer movement with you. Though you can do this alone, it doesn’t mean you have to.

You won’t ask him the details of how you’ll die, just as you know that in the years that you’ll have together, he won’t ask you for details on how _he’ll_ die (whenever he figures out that that’s what happens). You’re still haunted by that smile at the hypocenter, but you understand it, and you know that you’ll smile when your time comes, too.

While you’re setting up the network that needs to be in place both forward and backward, you go deep enough into redacted archives to find the chronological first documented description of reversed entropy. A great deal of the text remains unrecoverable, but the MI6 vaults give you initials of the young physicist behind the work, and that’s all you need.

In your hands is the evidence of why and how you recruit Neil. You don’t know the when, but you don’t need to know that.

Not yet, and not for a long while.

+

The fifth time you see Neil, you’re doing a second sweep through someone else’s heist, and are using said heist as a cover for your true mission. You get a glimpse of him running across a rooftop, and it’s so brief that you’re not sure that he sees you at all.

But it’s that incident that leads to your sixth time seeing Neil, which is also the first time that you’ve made it happen on purpose.

You’ve called in for a contact with specific skills, and though the chances of getting Neil were not great, you trust your future self to make it happen. A few days prior in your chronology, you bought a red string with a washer, and it’s packed into the suitcase that’s in the car you’re driving. It would be a shame not to give it to its proper owner as soon as possible.

As for Neil, he’s standing by the side of a long, quiet road just outside Amiens, his brows furrowed as he flips through a map. He looks every part the hitchhiker, and he has with him a non-military grade rucksack, from which hangs a black teardrop knot.

Today, you’re the considerate commuter, and pull up to the side of the road. When he jogs up to your car, his eyes are bright and his mouth is slanted in suppressed pleasure of seeing you. You know that this is it.

“Need a ride?” you ask.

“Thanks.” Neil enters your car, and into your slipstream.


End file.
